Fueled by the increasing user demand for data such as images, video, multimedia and various databases, data centers are expected to grow from today's petascale (i.e., computer systems capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second) to exascale (i.e., a thousand fold increase over petascale). Moreover, the continued emergence of new, widely diverse web services and cloud computing applications require future data centers to be more flexible/elastic. Another increasingly important requirement in future data centers is the ability to achieve very-low-latency, high-performance server-to-server connectivity, as emerging applications will likely be more complex and more computationally intensive, and thus will require much more interactions among servers compared to interactions with external clients.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.